Signifier

In the poem, “The Battle of Maldon,” an anonymous poet describes a fearsome battle between the Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons. Told entirely from the English perspective, the poem sings countless praises of the Anglo-Saxons, depicting them as heroes commanding their souls to God and sacrificing themselves to advance a greater cause. The speaker depicts war as a heroic endeavor, begetting camaraderie, bravery, loyalty, and perseverance. Soldiers are passionate about the cause, fighting for romantic…

“All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances”. This is a hard lesson that many people learn throughout their lives. Author Danzy Senna exemplifies this with her characters in her novel Caucasia. The story is about a mixed raced family living in 1970’s Boston, Massachusetts. Birdie and Cole are the daughters of a Black father, Deck and a white mother, Sally. Both parents’ are on different sides of the Civil Rights Movement. The…

A recent, two women version of Calderon de la Barca's Life is a Dream was staged in London this year, retelling it from the point of view of its main female character. The website for Rosaura proclaims her as "one of the strongest characters in the history of theatre", (REF), which leads to the impression that Calderon had written a proto-feminist character, despite his strong absolutist and catholic views. After all, in the original play, when Rosaura bursts onto the stage, dressed like a man,…

Baldwin 1 Courtney Baldwin Ms. Pino AP English 11- P3 11 January 2015 The Martyr’s Remembrance (Moment 1); Chapter 2; Nature There is a distinct difference between wanting to taste nature and wanting to spit out sociality. The sole fact of preferring butterflies over being a social butterfly does not justify the assumption that one is escaping their situation, it rather transfers that they are intrigued by a different reality. In the novel, Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, Chris McCandless has…

At some point, we must let the students in our schools learn about the complex, confusing mess that is life. Will it be difficult? Yes. Will it be uncomfortable at times? Definitely. But here’s the thing: that discomfort that will be felt is the signifier of real learning. As one high school teacher puts it, it’s a fact that “real teaching is about growth, and that real growth (especially in a classroom) can be uncomfortable” (Brezicki). In that sense, preventing students from accessing novels…

by being the sole provider in the home and Robbie being portrayed as the “Homemaker” or a housewife that has to stay home and be domestic. In Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) states that “Women Stands in patriarchal as signifier of male others, being bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies”. The movie relates with this point because in one of scenes in the movie Naomi’s aunt suddenly passes away from a heart attack and they are set to go to the…

A critique on post-revolutionary America, Rip Van Winkle wakes up twenty years in the future and discovers exactly what he once knew, his house, town, and faces aged. However, America has usurped the British troops and overthrown the government, which Rip discovers as he explores his town after his journey through time. Scholars claim that the intent in subtly criticize the new American power, and demonstrate through Rip that pre-revolution America was not what history suggests (Pearce 1).…

The Modernist writers were aware that they were living in an age which was undergoing massive change. Virginia Woolf famously said “on or about December 1910 human character changed.” Awareness of this change radically affected their writing. The investigations of Freud, Marx and the new developments in the empirical sciences influenced their worldview and their works of art. The stable worldview that writers like George Eliot were used to was changing. The idea of the organic growth of an…

You enter an art gallery and you come upon Cindy Sherman’s #10 untitled film still (fig. A.1.). In this photograph you see women squatting down on the floor; her skirt is pulled up. You are taken aback by the girl in this sexual position, and frankly, you are a bit uncomfortable. You then see the spilled groceries on the ground and place her in the place of a housewife, running around to cook dinner for her husband. The way that we view this photograph can be attributed back to the theory, of…

Throughout most of this class this semester, the idea of what makes an Islamic movement authentically “Islamic” appears to be explicit, hardline doctrinal ties to the establishment of some sort of Islamic polity. As Ali Rahnema mentions in the introduction of the Pioneers of the Islamic Revival: “Islamic Revivalism …is characterized by a renewed interest in Islam as an endogenous ideology with redeeming powers. For the born-again Muslim the Qur’an and the Tradition of the Prophet provide…